Step 7: Measure – 7 Steps to Successful Social Media Marketing

Step 7. Measure

We have arrived at the finale of our blog series, 7 Steps to Successful Social Media Marketing, Step 7 Measure.

To recap, we’ve discussed why social media is important for your business and brand, and how to get started. In Step 1 we explained why research is key to identifying your audience, market influencers and competitors, as well as determining which social media platforms to pursue.

Step 2 was all about setting clear goals for each platform, while Step 3 informed you about branding and the importance of maintaining your brand identity on those platforms.

Step 4 focused on content, including the different types of content, and tools and approaches that are available to populate content for your platforms. Along with content, social media is all about how you engage with your audience, which we discussed in Step 5.

What good is being active on social media if no one sees it? That’s where Step 6 comes in–marketing and how to get your posts in front of your desired audience.

Now, Step 7 – Measuring.

Once you’ve launched your business into social media you’ll need to measure how you are doing and determine if you are on the right path to reaching your goals. Once you have defined goals for each social media network you will need to determine what key measurements to use to evaluate their effectiveness.

You can easily measure number of followers and likes, but what does that mean for your business? How will you measure ROI? Social media isn’t a science but it is best to work with some quantitative analysis where it’s available.

Analytics

Facebook Page Insights allow you to track and measure the results of each campaign and of each individual post with different metrics including reach, engagement, clicks, etc.

Google Analytics is another great resource to measure where your inbound links and referrals are coming from and which campaigns are driving traffic to your site. You can see how many new visitors are coming to your site versus returning visitors. If your goal was to increase sales from new customers, you can then compare these metrics against your sales for that period.

If you have been using a third-party app to help your marketing efforts, check out the app’s measuring tools. They should be able to provide you a breakdown of engagement and metrics, some with very detailed analysis. Some apps will even compare how your social media account is performing compared to your competitors’ accounts.

With these tools, companies are able to gain a new level of understanding about their consumers. Once you’ve evaluated your success, you can further decide if you want to adjust your goals, your content or your marketing to maximize your budget and better achieve your future goals.

Evaluate

At the end of your timeline (the T in SMART Goal Setting) it will be time to evaluate your goal and determine your success. Remember, just because you may not reach your goal, doesn’t mean you have failed. Take your results and learn from them. How can you do better in the future? What is working? What isn’t working?

Remember the Deloitte study we cited in our first blog? Measuring sales alone shouldn’t be your only metric. Social media delivers a lot of intangible benefits that you need to consider, such as inspiration and belonging to a community, which help to build brand loyalty in the long run.

Conclusion

Social media is a necessary component of any business’s marketing efforts. Along with your website, social media gives you a digital presence and an outlet to speak directly to your audience.

To do it effectively, social media requires time and resources. Whether or not you should keep your social media management internal or outsourced is a decision many businesses, big and small, encounter.